Chapter 4
Plummet pitched and swung wildly as it was hoisted up and onto Ultramarine’s deck. They were hove-to in the lee of the Farallon Islands, thirty kilometres west of San Francisco, but the sea here was calm only in comparison to the storm-driven waves nearby.
Don crawled to the rear of Plummet’s cabin. Grunting, he straightened up and opened the hatch. Rain sluiced down on him as he climbed out.
A couple of crewmen helped him down from the superstructure; he was stiff and clumsy, and a little dizzy.
“How do you feel?” one of the crewmen asked.
“Okay.” He turned to look at the sub. “Poor Plummet.”
Ignoring the rain, Don walked around the submersible. He had seen at once, when the hatch opened, that the sail — a metal skirt around the hatch — had been torn away. Plummet’s bright yellow paint was pitted and chipped, in many places right down to the steel. Rocks had gouged and dented the hull; the protective screens around the propellers were clogged with gravel. The manipulator arm was mangled.
“I hope Owen won’t be too sore when he sees this.”
“He already has.” The crewman pointed to the bridge, where two pale faces showed through rain-blurred windows. Don waved; the men waved back.
He left the deck and went down a corridor to his tiny cabin; on the way he met Shirley Yamamura, the ship’s doctor. She cleaned the gash on his scalp and put a bandage over it.
“A real turbidity current, huh? You’re lucky,” she remarked.
“Pretty sloppy kind of luck. Ow.”
“Poor baby. No, really — too bad it didn’t happen when the networks were still operating. You’d’ve been the biggest thing since Cousteau.”
“Maybe I’m lucky at that: What’s happened to San Francisco?”
“They’ve had at least three big tsunamis, maybe four or five. I’m afraid I’m going to be awfully busy when we get back.” Her lined face was set. “See you later.”
Don got out of his wet, bloodstained clothes and pulled on dry jeans and a red flannel shirt. Then he went up to the bridge.
Except for the rattle of rain on the windows, the bridge was quiet and dim. Bill Murphy, the skipper, stood beside Owen Ussery, the ship’s chief scientist. Bill was a short, compact man with a soupstrainer moustache and curly black hair that stuck out around a Giants baseball cap. The cap, together with his wrinkled plaid shirt and brown corduroys, made him look more like a suburban father than a master mariner. Owen was tall and thin, with a long sallow face and short white hair. He wore a baggy grey cardigan and shapeless blue slacks tucked into gumboots.
“Glad to see ya,” Bill said, punching Don’s arm. “How’s your head feel?”
“Like a hangover. Good to see you guys. Uh — sorry about the sub, Owen.”
“That’s the least of our problems. We’ll just take it out of your pay.” Owen nodded towards the window. “Look.” Just above the wave-chopped eastern horizon, a dark cloud merged into the overcast.
“Is that the city?”
Owen blew his nose. “Yes, that’s the city. We’ve been trying to raise the Institute, but there’s no reply.”
“What we’re picking up from CBers and hams is really bad,” said Bill. “So I’m staying put until the waves are all finished.”
Owen pursed his lips. “We’ve been discussing our options,” he said dryly. “I feel we should get home as soon as possible. Sitting out here is not doing anyone any good.”
“Sorry, Owen.” Bill Murphy’s dark eyes met the chief scientist’s. “We stay put until the waves stop.”
Don eased himself into a chair. He ached, and felt a little seasick. “That could be a long wait, Bill.”
“How come?”
Don seemed to ignore the question. “Owen — was this really from a quake in the Antarctic? Any details?”
“Not much. There was a quake, eight or a little better on the Richter scale, somewhere in West Antarctica. Mount Erebus is erupting too, but that’s all we heard.”
“Look, I don’t know enough to be sure, but these waves could go on for days or weeks.”
“How so?” Owen walked with practised ease across the swaying Moor and took the chair next to Don’s. Bill glanced at his steersman and then joined them.
“I told you my brother’s in the Antarctic. He’s got a theory that a quake down there could start a surge of the ice sheet. That would dump a lot of ice into the ocean, all at once. And if the surge is periodic, we’ll get more tsunamis.”
“We can stay out for two weeks more if we have to,” said Bill.
“Not much point,” said Don. “If the waves are caused by an ice surge, and the surge is periodic, the next series of waves could come at any time. We might as well go in now.”
“Not in this storm,” Bill said. “Wait until morning. It’ll blow itself out by then. And if it hasn’t, at least we’ll be able to see where we’re going.”
“Fair enough,” said Owen. “Don, let’s get you down to the wardroom and feed you something. You must be starving.”
The thought of food made Don feel queasy, but he got to his feet and went out with Owen. He listened only absently to Owen’s talk about the tsunamis and the turbidity current and the need for more biological samples.
The wardroom was hot and smelled of pea soup. Don walked unsteadily to a table and sat down, leaning on his elbows with his hands on his face. It occurred to him that his brother might be dead, far away on the ice. He began to shudder.
Owen handed him a plastic tumbler with two fingers of brandy in it. Don took a small sip and felt a little steadier. He saw that the wardroom was crowded with scientists and technicians, all of them too busy to greet him with more than a nod or wave. Charts had been taped onto bulkheads, showing the California coast in detail. A loudspeaker was linked to the radio shack. The men and women in the wardroom were very quiet as they scrawled lines across the charts based on reports that came over the loud-speaker. A rough picture was emerging.
Tsunamis had travelled up the Gulf of California, between Baja and the Mexican mainland, and had swept over the low-lying Imperial Valley. El Centro and several other farming towns were under water. San Diego and La Jolla had been flooded, but the coast around San Clemente had escaped. Long Beach and Wilmington were in ruins. The waves had bypassed Los Angeles’s western beaches and densely populated shoreline, but from Topanga to Malibu the coast highway and hundreds of houses had disappeared.
The small towns and cities from Santa Barbara to Big Sur were silent. So were Carmel and Monterey. The 500,000-tonne tanker Sitka Carrier, preparing to offload a cargo of diesel fuel and gasoline at Moss Landing, had gone down in Monterey Bay. Santa Cruz, and the north end of Monterey Bay, had been flooded up to three kilometres inland.
Details were clearest about the Bay Area. The waves had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge and virtually all of the San Francisco waterfront. Seiches in the bay were scouring out the landfill on which thousands of houses had been built. Fires were spreading across San Francisco, Oakland and Tiburon. The huge tank farm in Richmond, storing millions of tonnes of oil and gasoline, had been flooded. Many of the tanks had been breached and were on fire; the northeast corner of the bay was covered with a burning slick. The wind from the west was confining most of it to the Richmond shoreline, but the outgoing tide was drawing the slick towards San Francisco and the Marin shoreline.
A chlorine spill in Oakland looked really bad. Two policemen in Piedmont had reported seeing a greenish haze spreading across the freeway towards the hills on the east. That meant that scores of thousands of people in the path of the chlorine cloud were almost certainly dead.